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Cocoanut and Pineapple Salad
Drain the contents from a can of pineapple. Lay the slices of pineapple on crisp lettuce leaves on salad plates, fill the centers with cream cheese seasoned with paprika; garnish with strips of pimentos and heaps of Dromedary Cocoanut. Serve with the following dressing:-Heat the juice from the can of pineapple with three tablespoons of vinegar and bring to boiling point. Mix one tablespoon of flour with a pinch of salt and one-half cup of sugar and beat in two yolks of eggs mixed with two tablespoons of water. Stir into the hot liquid and cook until it thickens.
A composed fruit salad plate of the sort that filled American luncheon menus a century ago, served with a cooked "boiled dressing" rather than mayonnaise. The dressing is the only part that needs care.
- The hinge: temper the yolksThe instruction to "stir into the hot liquid" means the yolk mixture goes into the boiling juice, where it can scramble on contact. Ladle a little hot liquid into the yolks first, whisk, then return everything to the pan and cook, stirring constantly, until it thickens and coats a spoon. Strain it if any bits set up.
- Dromedary CocoanutThe brand product was shredded desiccated coconut. Sweetened flaked coconut is the usual substitute; unsweetened works well here and cuts the sugar of the whole plate.
- Cream cheese in 1920s termsThis means soft, fresh, Philadelphia-style cheese, sold in small foil bricks then as now. Bring it fully to room temperature and beat it smooth before seasoning with paprika, or it will not mound in the pineapple rings.
- The canCanned sliced pineapple in this period came in several sizes, commonly around 20 oz or larger, holding a handful of slices and roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of a cup of juice. If your juice measures short, make up the difference with water so the flour and sugar have enough liquid to disperse in.
- Sugar levelHalf a cup of sugar to under a cup of juice makes a frankly candy-sweet dressing by current taste, on top of already-sweet canned fruit and sweetened coconut. A third of a cup is closer to modern palates and does not affect the thickening.
- PimentosJarred whole pimientos, drained and cut into thin strips, are what is meant. Roasted red peppers from a jar are the usual stand-in and behave the same way.
- Serve it coldThe dressing is cooked hot but belongs chilled; pour it into a bowl, cover the surface to stop a skin forming, and refrigerate before spooning it over the plates. It thickens further as it cools and keeps three or four days.
- YieldOne can of pineapple and one 8 oz brick of cream cheese make four to six salad plates, with dressing to spare.
Dromedary was the fruit-and-coconut line of the Hills Brothers Company of New York, and this booklet is a piece of brand advertising in cookbook form "Cocoanut and Date Salads" presumably exists as a chapter because those were the two products the company had most reason to promote, though that is inference rather than anything the booklet states. The recipe is a textbook example of the American luncheon salad of the 1910s and 1920s: canned fruit arranged on lettuce, a mound of soft cheese, a bright garnish, and a sweet cooked dressing, all of it assembled rather than cooked. That dressing is the older tradition showing through. Boiled dressings thickened with flour and egg yolk were the standard household salad sauce through the nineteenth century, cheaper and more stable than an oil emulsion; commercial mayonnaise reached American grocery shelves in the 1910s and gradually displaced them, though sweet cooked dressings survived longest exactly here, on fruit.